ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Can we do the Accidental Car podcast for a minute?

00:00:03 ◼   ► Please?

00:00:04 ◼   ► Sure.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Pretty please.

00:00:06 ◼   ► We had a big week last week.

00:00:08 ◼   ► It was a good week.

00:00:09 ◼   ► It was a huge week for everybody.

00:00:12 ◼   ► For the show, for John Siracusa.

00:00:15 ◼   ► For everybody who matters, it was a big week.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I had such a great time at WWDC and I know I speak for both of you guys in saying that.

00:00:23 ◼   ► And it was especially peculiar for me, having kind of been that guy that hangs out with

00:00:28 ◼   ► Marco and John for the last couple years and now getting recognized occasionally.

00:00:33 ◼   ► It was the trippiest, most flattering and awesome thing.

00:00:38 ◼   ► I don't even know what to make of it.

00:00:39 ◼   ► I'm still like processing it all.

00:00:40 ◼   ► See, I told you that would happen.

00:00:42 ◼   ► When we started this podcast, I told Casey, "Look, just so you know, if you're on a podcast

00:00:48 ◼   ► and people listen to it, next year at WWDC, everyone is going to know who you are."

00:00:53 ◼   ► And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

00:00:55 ◼   ► People were coming up.

00:00:57 ◼   ► John and I, people have known who we were at WBC for a few years, a little bit, but

00:01:02 ◼   ► Casey, oh my god, he was the star. Everyone's like, "Oh my god, I love you on the show!"

00:01:07 ◼   ► Everyone was so thrilled. Nobody gave a crap about us. Everyone was so thrilled to meet

00:01:11 ◼   ► Casey Liss.

00:01:12 ◼   ► That is a very flattering, bold-faced lie.

00:01:14 ◼   ► You were there!

00:01:16 ◼   ► Well everyone was excited, but I think it was like, "Oh, you're Casey! Oh, you're Marco,

00:01:20 ◼   ► and you're John." But no, all kidding aside, it was extremely flattering, and many thanks

00:01:25 ◼   ► everyone who had the chutzpah to say hi. I know we talked about it a couple shows ago,

00:01:29 ◼   ► but it was still extremely cool to meet all of these people that I perhaps wouldn't have

00:01:35 ◼   ► had the opportunity to meet otherwise because we would have both been just faces in the

00:01:37 ◼   ► crowd. So many thanks for all you guys and gals that said hi and had nice things to say

00:01:43 ◼   ► no less. We only had a couple verbal complaints about Neutral, and I consider that a moral

00:01:48 ◼   ► victory.

00:01:49 ◼   ► I was impressed that anybody actually listened to Neutral who came up to us at that conference.

00:01:53 ◼   ► That's true.

00:01:54 ◼   ► And we did have a few fans who really wanted us to bring it back.

00:01:58 ◼   ► Yeah, which was also weird.

00:02:00 ◼   ► And as a quick aside, I drove an M3 today.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Yeah, which generation was that?

00:02:04 ◼   ► E90.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Nice, all right.

00:02:06 ◼   ► Yeah, it was really cool.

00:02:08 ◼   ► It was like my car plus 10%, 15%.

00:02:11 ◼   ► It was fun.

00:02:12 ◼   ► We should do a podcast about cars sometime.

00:02:13 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

00:02:14 ◼   ► You think anyone would like that?

00:02:16 ◼   ► Hell no.

00:02:17 ◼   ► I don't think anyone will.

00:02:19 ◼   ► It's not bad the pricing on the M3 is not your car plus 15%.

00:02:22 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:02:23 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:02:24 ◼   ► Well, actually, I guess it's in the ballpark. How much does an M3 these days?

00:02:27 ◼   ► I think a well-equipped one is something like 70 or 80, right? I mean, I think it's like

00:02:32 ◼   ► in the 70s, something like that? I don't know. I never priced one out.

00:02:35 ◼   ► I mean, my car plus 15% would have been... Oh, no, you're right. My car plus 15% was

00:02:41 ◼   ► not even near 70. I'm dead wrong. Anyway, all right, so we should probably talk about

00:02:46 ◼   ► nerdy stuff that's not cars. What did you guys think of WWDC? Let's start with Mr.

00:02:50 ◼   ► Sirakusa.

00:02:51 ◼   ► Didn't we do a whole show about this last time?

00:02:53 ◼   ► Well, yeah, but a lot has happened since then.

00:02:56 ◼   ► OK, fine.

00:02:56 ◼   ► We can ignore everything.

00:02:58 ◼   ► I have things in the notes.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Consult the notes.

00:03:01 ◼   ► The notes.

00:03:02 ◼   ► The notes.

00:03:03 ◼   ► Actually, I've been pulling a Marco

00:03:04 ◼   ► and largely ignoring the notes, but I do have them up.

00:03:06 ◼   ► So with that in mind--

00:03:08 ◼   ► I don't even have Chrome open.

00:03:10 ◼   ► You don't have your Chrome jail open?

00:03:12 ◼   ► John, would you like to talk about any of the Mac Pro

00:03:15 ◼   ► details we've learned?

00:03:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I got a little Mac Pro follow up.

00:03:19 ◼   ► So we talked about it at length on the last show,

00:03:23 ◼   ► And there are two things that I want to talk about since then.

00:03:27 ◼   ► The first one is about this article that I wrote a while ago called "The Case for a True

00:03:32 ◼   ► Mac Pro Successor."

00:03:35 ◼   ► And it was me arguing the point before we knew what the fate of the Mac Pro was, that

00:03:38 ◼   ► Apple should continue to push the envelope in desktop computer performance for all the

00:03:44 ◼   ► same reasons that car manufacturers make these ridiculous cars that nobody buys that are

00:03:52 ◼   ► that are not practical and that cost way too much money,

00:03:57 ◼   ► and that lose money for the companies,

00:03:59 ◼   ► all because they want to push the limits of car technology

00:04:02 ◼   ► and performance.

00:04:03 ◼   ► And in the end, deep, deep down, because the people who

00:04:06 ◼   ► work at those companies love cars.

00:04:08 ◼   ► And that's why they want to make supercars or halo cars,

00:04:11 ◼   ► as I call them.

00:04:12 ◼   ► And so when the new Mac Pro was announced last week,

00:04:18 ◼   ► I thought I had addressed this in the last week's show,

00:04:20 ◼   ► but apparently not clearly enough.

00:04:21 ◼   ► of people ask me, "So is this a true Mac Pro successor? Does this meet the criteria

00:04:28 ◼   ► that you laid out in the case for a true Mac Pro successor, or are you still disappointed?"

00:04:32 ◼   ► And the fact that on the last show I was saying how this doesn't quite look like it's the

00:04:35 ◼   ► machine for me, so on and so forth, people are like, "Oh, I don't see how this isn't

00:04:39 ◼   ► a true Mac Pro successor, isn't it?" Well, so to be clear and spell it out, yes, this

00:04:43 ◼   ► is definitely a true Mac Pro successor. It completely fits the mold of the super-card

00:04:48 ◼   ► type things. It's ridiculous, it's crazy, it does not look like a normal computer. We

00:04:53 ◼   ► don't know the price yet, but I assume it's going to be really expensive, certainly more

00:04:57 ◼   ► expensive than the other things there. It has compromises that most people wouldn't

00:05:01 ◼   ► expect, like the dual GPUs that are going to be these big honking GPUs that maybe everybody

00:05:06 ◼   ► doesn't need, but at the same time it doesn't have any internal spinning disk storage, which

00:05:10 ◼   ► is kind of like a supercar that has like 900 horsepower but a trunk that fits one little

00:05:14 ◼   ► tiny bag in it, right? And I'm hoping, or I'm assuming Apple hopes that they sell way

00:05:19 ◼   ► more Mac Pros than people sell their top-end supercars, but this computer, despite or perhaps

00:05:25 ◼   ► because of the fact that it doesn't satisfy all of the practical needs of various pro

00:05:30 ◼   ► users and stuff, definitely fits the bill. So despite the fact that I was disappointed

00:05:35 ◼   ► in it last week for various personal reasons, as I thought I expressed in the last show,

00:05:41 ◼   ► I'm happy that Apple continues to innovate to use Phil Schiller's bird in this area and

00:05:48 ◼   ► to continue to chase the high end.

00:05:50 ◼   ► And the second thing about the Mac Pro is that my opinion of it has softened a little

00:05:55 ◼   ► bit from my own personal views since last week's episode, in that since then I've learned

00:06:02 ◼   ► or actually been reminded, and I don't know why I didn't think of this last week, that

00:06:07 ◼   ► the gaming performance, the thing that's really been holding me back, like, "Oh, I'm going

00:06:09 ◼   ► to spend all this money on this machine, and I'm going to have all these compromises with

00:06:12 ◼   ► no internal storage and everything, and I'm going to get a machine that's not going to

00:06:16 ◼   ► fulfill one of my main criteria, which is to be able to play PC/Mac games really, really

00:06:21 ◼   ► well, because it's got these pro GPUs in them.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And to people who aren't familiar with the pro GPU market, or maybe people who are familiar

00:06:30 ◼   ► — more familiar than I was — that sounds crazy.

00:06:33 ◼   ► It was like, "Well, these are super high-end GPUs.

00:06:35 ◼   ► Isn't that great for gaming?

00:06:36 ◼   ► aren't these going to be, you know, like they're, these are like $2,000 GPUs, and

00:06:40 ◼   ► there shouldn't you have awesome gaming performance on this? And if you look at like Windows benchmarks

00:06:45 ◼   ► and stuff for these pro GPUs that are used for like CAD and 3D programs, and they test

00:06:51 ◼   ► Windows games on them, the gaming performance of these GPUs is terrible. And you say, how

00:06:54 ◼   ► can I spend $1,500 on a video card and get terrible gaming performance? And the answer

00:07:01 ◼   ► is the drivers. The drivers are made to run Maya or AutoCAD or whatever other programs

00:07:07 ◼   ► and used for professional design. And those programs demand precision and repeatability

00:07:13 ◼   ► and reliability. They don't demand all sorts of the performance tricks that gaming GPUs

00:07:19 ◼   ► use. So you'll see a GPU that costs three times as much as another one not perform as

00:07:24 ◼   ► well in a game. And on the PC side, on Windows, when you buy one of those high-end GPUs, you

00:07:30 ◼   ► get these special, you know, certified OpenGL drivers to be used with whatever software

00:07:35 ◼   ► you bought and it works. And when you buy just like a gaming video card, even a super

00:07:39 ◼   ► high-end game video card, you get a totally different driver. And that one is optimized

00:07:44 ◼   ► to make sure you get really high frame rates in Crysis 3 or whatever, because they tuned

00:07:47 ◼   ► the driver for that. And a lot of that tuning has to do with cheating, where they can say,

00:07:50 ◼   ► "Yeah, the OpenGL spec says we're supposed to do this and that in terms of line precision

00:07:55 ◼   ► anti-aliasing or occlusion or whatever, but we found that in this game, we can detect when this game is running.

00:08:01 ◼   ► I don't know if they still did that, but in the old days they would detect which specific game is running

00:08:05 ◼   ► and perform some optimization that they knew wouldn't cause any noticeable graphical glitching in that game

00:08:09 ◼   ► just to get more performance out of it.

00:08:13 ◼   ► And that's why I was disappointed. Oh, pro GPUs, that means crappy game performance.

00:08:16 ◼   ► It's like the worst of both worlds, expensive video hardware and crappy game performance.

00:08:20 ◼   ► But, on the Mac, that is not the case.

00:08:23 ◼   ► on the Mac, historically Apple has shipped, used the same driver for the pro cards and

00:08:30 ◼   ► the non-pro cards.

00:08:31 ◼   ► And in the past that's meant that Apple's game performance sucked equally across all

00:08:35 ◼   ► the GPUs because they always optimized the drivers for correctness.

00:08:38 ◼   ► They would say, "Okay, let's do exactly what the OpenGL specs does and correctness first

00:08:42 ◼   ► and we'll worry about speed later and we'll try to tweak it and so on and so forth."

00:08:44 ◼   ► But over the past several releases, I think starting in 10.7, Apple has really tuned their

00:08:49 ◼   ► video drivers to actually get decent performance out of games by working with companies like

00:08:53 ◼   ► Valve and stuff to sort of do all those cheaty little things that you can do to make game

00:08:56 ◼   ► performance better.

00:08:58 ◼   ► But at the same time, those same drivers were also driving their high-end carts.

00:09:02 ◼   ► So it's my expectation that when I get this new Mac Pro, which I think I am going to get

00:09:06 ◼   ► now, it's going to use the exact same drivers as a Mac Pro that had a high-end Radeon like

00:09:12 ◼   ► a previous generation Mac Pro.

00:09:14 ◼   ► It's not going to be a special, slow, dumb, high-precision driver just for these things.

00:09:19 ◼   ► going to use the exact same driver as the gaming video card would use, and that means

00:09:22 ◼   ► it should have pretty darn good gaming performance, at least as good as it would have had a Mac

00:09:29 ◼   ► gaming card.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Now, it doesn't quite help me that much unless Apple also does drivers for boot camp, so

00:09:33 ◼   ► that if I reboot into Windows, I don't want to be forced to use the Windows slow drivers

00:09:37 ◼   ► for this Pro GPU or whatever, but just having decent Mac gaming performance on the thing

00:09:43 ◼   ► makes me feel a lot better, so I think I'm definitely getting one of these machines now.

00:09:46 ◼   ► Now, I have to ask, for your priorities as high performance, but also significant gaming,

00:09:54 ◼   ► now that we know what the compromises are for the next Mac Pro, at least we know most

00:09:58 ◼   ► of them, I think, why not a high-end iMac?

00:10:02 ◼   ► The video cards on those things are not desktop cards.

00:10:07 ◼   ► Some of them might be.

00:10:08 ◼   ► Don't some of them use laptop GPUs?

00:10:10 ◼   ► I think they're actually pretty good these days.

00:10:12 ◼   ► I mean, it's not going to be like the equivalent of like a $400 desktop card, but I think they're

00:10:18 ◼   ► pretty good.

00:10:19 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I'm looking for.

00:10:20 ◼   ► They're not powerful and they're not replaceable, so I couldn't even upgrade them.

00:10:24 ◼   ► Not that the GPUs are in the Mac Pro replaceable, but if I'm going to buy a machine, I always

00:10:27 ◼   ► buy it with the very fastest GPU that's in it so that I can use it for five years or

00:10:33 ◼   ► whatever, and at the end of those five years it'll still be good.

00:10:35 ◼   ► Like I bought the highest end non-Pro video card that I could get with my current Mac

00:10:39 ◼   ► Pro. And to this day, I can still play modern games on it at the full resolution of my screen

00:10:44 ◼   ► with the settings on normal or even up on high. So I just want to get mileage out of the card,

00:10:48 ◼   ► you know? And that would be the 8800GT?

00:10:50 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, think of a game that came out recently. Well, not that...

00:10:55 ◼   ► I'm the wrong person to ask. But I'm surprised that that... Because the 8800GT is now like,

00:11:00 ◼   ► what, five years old? I'm surprised, given the pace of video card innovation,

00:11:05 ◼   ► I'm surprised that you can still do that with a five-year-old card.

00:11:08 ◼   ► I mean, I can't play the very latest games, but I'm not playing the very latest games.

00:11:11 ◼   ► When Portal 2 came out, I could play it just fine.

00:11:14 ◼   ► Full frame rate, full resolution, anti-aliasing, everything, alright?

00:11:17 ◼   ► And that was only a couple years ago.

00:11:18 ◼   ► I think the most recent game I played was Walking Dead, which is not a graphically intensive

00:11:23 ◼   ► game, but it ran fine.

00:11:24 ◼   ► Diablo 3, when that came out, ran fine.

00:11:27 ◼   ► This is all going to be impaired by what I hope will be my retina screen on my Mac Pro,

00:11:33 ◼   ► right?

00:11:34 ◼   ► So then that video card maybe won't last quite as long, because, I don't know, I don't know

00:11:38 ◼   ► how many games will take advantage of their retina resolution going forward.

00:11:42 ◼   ► But that's what I want, especially in a machine where it's not replaceable.

00:11:45 ◼   ► I want to get the most mileage out of it.

00:11:47 ◼   ► So I wouldn't want to buy something that's OK performance.

00:11:50 ◼   ► It's obvious anything I buy is going to be faster than the 8800 GT.

00:11:54 ◼   ► But I wouldn't want to buy an iMac with a sort of mediocre desktop GPU with not too

00:12:00 ◼   ► much VRAM in it.

00:12:01 ◼   ► That's probably going to last me three or four years, and then I would have to not play

00:12:07 ◼   ► PC games anymore, think about upgrading it sooner than I wanted, especially since if

00:12:10 ◼   ► I bought an iMac, the screen will probably last me five years easy, because I would probably

00:12:13 ◼   ► hold out for a retina iMac, right? And I would be like, "Oh, I don't want to get rid of the

00:12:16 ◼   ► screen. The only thing that's wrong with this machine is this stupid GPU that I can't replace."

00:12:21 ◼   ► So better to get a machine where everything is maxed out to a ridiculous degree, and then

00:12:26 ◼   ► the whole machine will age sort of together.

00:12:29 ◼   ► So I had a thought about the displays, and a lot of the scuttlebutt at WWDC was, "Geez,

00:12:34 ◼   ► didn't release a retina display for the Mac Pro. I mean, they made some hand-wavy talk

00:12:41 ◼   ► of, "Oh, this supports 4K screens," blah, three of them, in fact, if I'm not mistaken.

00:12:47 ◼   ► But they never announced an actual Apple display. And one of the things that occurred to me

00:12:51 ◼   ► when the three of us were at dinner one night was, if the Mac Pro is this black—I believe

00:12:57 ◼   ► it's aluminum, anodized aluminum, whatever it is, it's black—so if they release a retina

00:13:02 ◼   ► display. If Apple releases a retina display, is that also going to be black? And is this

00:13:06 ◼   ► the first time that we have not aluminum-colored aluminum or aluminum devices from Apple that

00:13:13 ◼   ► are computers, I should say, in a long time?

00:13:16 ◼   ► Right, that aren't just iPods.

00:13:17 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:13:18 ◼   ► Their displays are already black, though. Like, the part you can see when you're sitting

00:13:21 ◼   ► in front of one. I guess the foot is silver, but they've already changed the surface

00:13:24 ◼   ► of the things to be black, like the frame around the display.

00:13:27 ◼   ► Not all of them.

00:13:28 ◼   ► And it goes edge to edge now, right?

00:13:29 ◼   ► Well, not on my high-res MacBook Pros.

00:13:31 ◼   ► I mean, your point is still absolutely fair.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I mean, the external monitors, like the external ones.

00:13:35 ◼   ► Yeah, they change the external monitors

00:13:37 ◼   ► to be black when they're facing you

00:13:38 ◼   ► with the exception of the foot.

00:13:39 ◼   ► And I think that still matches with the black computer.

00:13:43 ◼   ► You know, I don't think that clashes.

00:13:45 ◼   ► I think that's-- they're neutral tones, right?

00:13:50 ◼   ► So why no displays then?

00:13:52 ◼   ► Oh, I don't know.

00:13:53 ◼   ► I mean, maybe they haven't decided what they can do,

00:13:54 ◼   ► haven't decided pricing.

00:13:55 ◼   ► I mean--

00:13:56 ◼   ► Well, my theory is-- and I forget

00:13:59 ◼   ► I said this last week or not, that it's interesting that Haswell is out for laptops, but they

00:14:06 ◼   ► only mentioned the MacBook Airs and they only updated the Airs. So my theory is sometime

00:14:11 ◼   ► later this year, in quotes, probably alongside the Mac Pro launch, they will potentially

00:14:19 ◼   ► also launch new Retina MacBook Pros with Haswell with Thunderbolt 2. And alongside those, they

00:14:28 ◼   ► will launch Retina displays. And only then the new Mac Pro and the new Haswell Retina

00:14:35 ◼   ► MacBook Pros will be able to drive them.

00:14:37 ◼   ► Do you know if that's a possibility? Haswell, CPU, and chipset, does it support Thunderbolt

00:14:45 ◼   ► 2?

00:14:46 ◼   ► Thunderbolt 2, from what I know, which I think the best person to ask for this would be an

00:14:51 ◼   ► An-Lol Shimpi, but the—and I'm sorry for the pronunciation if I got that wrong, which

00:14:56 ◼   ► which I probably got at least some part of it wrong.

00:15:00 ◼   ► I believe that the Thunderbolt 2 chip or chipset

00:15:04 ◼   ► or whatever it is that does it is separate

00:15:06 ◼   ► from the main motherboard chipset

00:15:08 ◼   ► and then can be installed or integrated

00:15:11 ◼   ► into any modern Intel board, I think.

00:15:14 ◼   ► And therefore-- - Yeah,

00:15:16 ◼   ► Chad Riggs says it does.

00:15:17 ◼   ► I suppose that's, I would have to know the dates on that.

00:15:20 ◼   ► I vaguely remember the code names

00:15:21 ◼   ► of those two different chipsets.

00:15:23 ◼   ► I think I only remember the, not the current one,

00:15:25 ◼   ► the next next one which is like Falcon Ridge or something but anyway I believe

00:15:28 ◼   ► I believe Falcon Ridge is Thunderbolt 2. I think that's the next next one. The next one is

00:15:33 ◼   ► something else Ridge. Anyway that is a reasonable reason why they those things

00:15:37 ◼   ► could have been delayed that they're gonna run Thunderbolt 2 but right because

00:15:40 ◼   ► it's weird that they didn't get any mention at all and yeah and those chips

00:15:44 ◼   ► are ready like it's what we think anyway I mean the other explanation is maybe

00:15:47 ◼   ► that Intel can't deliver those CPUs in volume yet that that's possible that's

00:15:52 ◼   ► certainly a more boring explanation for for the delay but Macbook Air doesn't use the same thing the Macbook Air uses the ultra low power

00:15:58 ◼   ► Vailing correct this big honking package thing which is totally different and apparently is enough of those to say hey the Macbook Airs are

00:16:03 ◼   ► shipping today right and

00:16:05 ◼   ► Usually I would expect those would be like the better binned parts because those are the ones that can run at super low voltages right

00:16:11 ◼   ► I mean like you would think if they can deliver those they can probably deliver the big ones

00:16:14 ◼   ► yeah, you would think so I think the

00:16:18 ◼   ► What do you call it?

00:16:19 ◼   ► The Thunderbolt 2 chipset thing could be the delay.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Or it could be they just have excess inventory

00:16:23 ◼   ► of the Retina MacBook Pros they want to get rid of

00:16:25 ◼   ► or something.

00:16:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:16:27 ◼   ► Or they're just holding it back until they

00:16:29 ◼   ► can launch the Mac Pro, which is at least Q3,

00:16:32 ◼   ► because the Mac Pro CPUs aren't out yet.

00:16:34 ◼   ► And so if they can do a big Pro launch, where they satisfy

00:16:38 ◼   ► all the Pros at once with a Mac Pro, new Retina MacBook

00:16:41 ◼   ► Pros, and a Retina display, that would be a nice little event.

00:16:45 ◼   ► And maybe they coincide it with a minor update

00:16:48 ◼   ► to Final Cut X or something like that.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:16:52 ◼   ► It would make sense to combine those timers

00:16:55 ◼   ► and to coalesce those timers into one thing.

00:16:58 ◼   ► That whole Mac Pro announcement was just really weird.

00:17:03 ◼   ► I mean, it was acknowledged to be weird in the keynote,

00:17:05 ◼   ► where they're like, we normally don't do this.

00:17:07 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, you normally don't do this.

00:17:09 ◼   ► Like, where you say, this product is really off

00:17:11 ◼   ► in the distance, but we know that people

00:17:13 ◼   ► are going to freak out if we don't say anything about it.

00:17:16 ◼   ► It's almost as if last year at WWDC they said,

00:17:19 ◼   ► "I know you're all waiting for a Mac Pro announcement,

00:17:21 ◼   ► "and here's these ones that aren't really that new,

00:17:24 ◼   ► "but trust us, next year we'll have a good one."

00:17:26 ◼   ► I mean, they kinda did that by having a public statement,

00:17:28 ◼   ► or not a public statement, an email response

00:17:30 ◼   ► from Tim Cook saying, "Oh yeah, I know.

00:17:32 ◼   ► "Next year, we'll have something nice."

00:17:33 ◼   ► But like, pre-announcing products, it's just crazy.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And I guess they did it for damage control,

00:17:38 ◼   ► because if they didn't, we all would've come out.

00:17:39 ◼   ► I mean, that's why none of us expected

00:17:41 ◼   ► a Mac Pro announcement, we were even joking about it,

00:17:43 ◼   ► because we knew it couldn't possibly be ready,

00:17:45 ◼   ► because we knew what kind of CPUs it would have to use,

00:17:47 ◼   ► and those weren't ready.

00:17:48 ◼   ► And sure enough, those aren't ready.

00:17:50 ◼   ► But Apple said, you know what?

00:17:51 ◼   ► Screw it.

00:17:51 ◼   ► We're going to show it to you anyway.

00:17:53 ◼   ► Here it is.

00:17:53 ◼   ► You can't buy it for a while.

00:17:54 ◼   ► We won't even tell you if we have monitors for it.

00:17:56 ◼   ► We won't tell you anything about pricing.

00:17:57 ◼   ► But it's here.

00:17:58 ◼   ► It's shaped like a garbage can.

00:18:00 ◼   ► It's coming.

00:18:02 ◼   ► I think a good point, too.

00:18:04 ◼   ► QRS in the chat room said Aperture 4, maybe,

00:18:08 ◼   ► is something to consider here.

00:18:10 ◼   ► You know, the new Mac Pro has this pretty lopsided design where it has only one CPU

00:18:18 ◼   ► socket, so it can get a good amount of CPU power in there, but then it has this insane

00:18:23 ◼   ► amount of GPU power that seems, from the wording they've used and what's on their side, it

00:18:29 ◼   ► seems as though the dual GPU setup is not optional.

00:18:33 ◼   ► It looks like all the Mac Pros will come with the same GPU setup.

00:18:37 ◼   ► And if that's the case, and obviously that's going to have potential cost implications,

00:18:43 ◼   ► but that is a really lopsided power balance of, you know, you get some CPU power, but

00:18:48 ◼   ► what you really want to buy this thing for is the GPUs.

00:18:51 ◼   ► And what's interesting, you know, I've seen a few places report that only one of the GPUs

00:18:59 ◼   ► is going to be used to drive the displays, and that the other one is going to be used

00:19:04 ◼   ► exclusively for OpenCL-type computations.

00:19:09 ◼   ► So it's interesting that you're going to have this ridiculous amount of power that today only a few apps

00:19:14 ◼   ► really make any good use of, right? I don't think it's very widely supported yet.

00:19:19 ◼   ► Maybe Apple's Pro apps are going to be substantially shifted

00:19:24 ◼   ► over to put a lot of work into OpenCL, maybe more than they already are.

00:19:29 ◼   ► already doing some.

00:19:32 ◼   ► Aperture already uses the GPUs like crazy.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And it's not so much that one GPU is dedicated to OpenCL.

00:19:37 ◼   ► It's that only one GPU is connected up

00:19:39 ◼   ► to the Thunderbolt ports.

00:19:41 ◼   ► So what's the--

00:19:42 ◼   ► And so they're both available for OpenCL.

00:19:44 ◼   ► When you write an OpenCL program,

00:19:46 ◼   ► you'll see both of those GPUs as available as whatever

00:19:48 ◼   ► the-- I think what they call them, like computing resources.

00:19:51 ◼   ► You see one CPU and two GPUs.

00:19:53 ◼   ► So you can use both of them.

00:19:55 ◼   ► It's just that only one of them has a place

00:19:58 ◼   ► where you can plug in a display.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So the other one is never going to drive a display, but even when one is driving a display,

00:20:04 ◼   ► you could run OpenCL stuff on both of them.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Right, okay.

00:20:08 ◼   ► And then what's interesting about that is that now you'll have this Mac Pro that, for

00:20:14 ◼   ► other reasons, it probably is going to be a pretty bad deal.

00:20:18 ◼   ► It's probably not going to be a great value for its CPU performance.

00:20:21 ◼   ► It's not going to be a great value for its RAM ceiling.

00:20:23 ◼   ► There's all these different things.

00:20:24 ◼   ► I expect this thing to cost like $3,000 or $4,000 bucks base.

00:20:30 ◼   ► But if pro users are using these certain software

00:20:33 ◼   ► packages that make really great use of OpenCL,

00:20:37 ◼   ► then this machine is going to blow away

00:20:39 ◼   ► the entire rest of the Mac lineup so much.

00:20:43 ◼   ► Well, think about what those people would have to pay before.

00:20:46 ◼   ► During the lunchtime demo where the guy from Pixar, W2C,

00:20:49 ◼   ► was up there demoing that program

00:20:50 ◼   ► and saying how great it was.

00:20:52 ◼   ► If he wanted to get the equivalent GPU

00:20:53 ◼   ► power in another machine, like even just the current Mac Pro, it would probably cost him

00:20:58 ◼   ► the price of a new Mac Pro just to buy the video cards, because they're so ridiculous,

00:21:02 ◼   ► like $3,500 for the video card.

00:21:05 ◼   ► And that's another thing on the Mac Pro.

00:21:07 ◼   ► I was thinking about pricing.

00:21:08 ◼   ► I think I tweeted this at Dr. Wave this week, where when we both came out of the-- Marco

00:21:14 ◼   ► and I came out of the keynote, we both said like $2,999 was our base price for the thing.

00:21:23 ◼   ► But now I think I've changed that, and I think they could hit 2,500 for the lowest, lowest

00:21:29 ◼   ► end.

00:21:30 ◼   ► And I think the way they could do that is the AMD Fire Pro GPU line comes in a lot of

00:21:35 ◼   ► different sizes.

00:21:36 ◼   ► And if Apple decides to offer anything other than the super duper high-end one, they could

00:21:43 ◼   ► reduce the price a lot.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Because I think everything else in there is relatively cheap.

00:21:46 ◼   ► Like there's not as many moving parts.

00:21:47 ◼   ► There's just one Intel CPU that cuts like 500 bucks off the price right there, which

00:21:51 ◼   ► is nice.

00:21:52 ◼   ► Apple's going to have crazy margins on their stupid PCI Express SSD thing, I'm sure, whatever.

00:21:57 ◼   ► The RAM middling. And if they can get the "crappy" Fire Pro GPUs in there with much,

00:22:04 ◼   ► much less VRAM instead of the maximum, I think I read together the maximum.

00:22:07 ◼   ► I believe there's six gigs each.

00:22:08 ◼   ► Yeah, six gigs each. I thought it was six gigs combined. So six gigs of VRAM each. And

00:22:12 ◼   ► again, gaming video cards at this point have two gigabytes of VRAM, like the most expensive

00:22:16 ◼   ► gaming cards you can get. These are going to have six gigs each.

00:22:18 ◼   ► And you know it's not gonna ship with a base RAM of the whole machine of 12 gigs

00:22:22 ◼   ► You know like like the video cards are gonna have more RAM than the main machine

00:22:25 ◼   ► I think the base might be 16 gigs

00:22:27 ◼   ► But but anyway if they if they cheap out on the GPUs

00:22:29 ◼   ► You could they could have an entry-level model that no one wants to buy including me for a 2,500 bucks

00:22:34 ◼   ► So it sounds like both of you guys are in for one though

00:22:38 ◼   ► Marco's gonna buy one for every room in the house doubles a ways better

00:22:44 ◼   ► I think I'll probably buy one, but I'm not--

00:22:49 ◼   ► the big two questions about what the price is going to be, and whether there will be retina displays.

00:22:54 ◼   ► If this ends up being one of the only machines that can drive a retina display,

00:22:59 ◼   ► and maybe the only one that can do it really well when those eventually come out,

00:23:04 ◼   ► then I'll buy one, no question. Because I really want a desktop-sized retina display.

00:23:09 ◼   ► the only one that's going to be able to play games on the right

00:23:11 ◼   ► end of the display.

00:23:11 ◼   ► I know how important that is to you.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Right, yeah.

00:23:13 ◼   ► I don't care about that at all.

00:23:15 ◼   ► I would feel kind of like an idiot

00:23:18 ◼   ► buying this computer that has these two

00:23:19 ◼   ► ridiculous high-powered GPUs and using them most of the time

00:23:24 ◼   ► to display TextMate and a web browser or Xcode.

00:23:29 ◼   ► That's usually what I'm doing.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Someone asked on Twitter today, won't text editor developers

00:23:35 ◼   ► and the people who write Xcode now change their applications

00:23:38 ◼   ► to take advantage of those dual GPUs.

00:23:40 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, how?

00:23:42 ◼   ► - I'm having trouble thinking of a way

00:23:45 ◼   ► that you can use that kind of GPU power

00:23:47 ◼   ► in your text editor unless all the text

00:23:50 ◼   ► was like made 3D and flying through

00:23:52 ◼   ► some kind of world as you typed, I don't know.

00:23:54 ◼   ► - So we're getting the Matrix text editor.

00:23:57 ◼   ► - Right, Minority Report.

00:23:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

00:24:00 ◼   ► All right, so is that all on the Mac Pro?

00:24:03 ◼   ► - I guess for now.

00:24:04 ◼   ► I mean, we really don't know much about it yet.

00:24:06 ◼   ► That's the big thing.

00:24:07 ◼   ► Like, until we know pricing and options,

00:24:11 ◼   ► and possibly retina question,

00:24:14 ◼   ► I think it's gonna be hard to make any other

00:24:17 ◼   ► really great statements about it,

00:24:18 ◼   ► just because we don't have it yet,

00:24:20 ◼   ► and there's so much we still don't know.

00:24:22 ◼   ► - All right, there's another piece of follow-up

00:24:26 ◼   ► that I think mostly John wanted to talk about,

00:24:28 ◼   ► then maybe we can do a sponsor.

00:24:29 ◼   ► So, John, tell me about the new Xbox

00:24:31 ◼   ► that just came out today.

00:24:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:24:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is the obvious joke.

00:24:36 ◼   ► You know, sometimes you wonder if these stories happen

00:24:42 ◼   ► because there's a perfect name for it.

00:24:46 ◼   ► They just couldn't resist.

00:24:47 ◼   ► So the show note and the million headlines

00:24:50 ◼   ► is Xbox 180, which is the obvious headline for the story

00:24:54 ◼   ► that Microsoft has reversed its decision on all of the DRM,

00:24:58 ◼   ► digital rights management, used game, always online things

00:25:02 ◼   ► about the Xbox One that everyone hated.

00:25:05 ◼   ► And so to recap, things that people hated were the Xbox had to check in with Microsoft

00:25:10 ◼   ► servers every 24 hours you were locked out of it.

00:25:13 ◼   ► People hated that.

00:25:14 ◼   ► People who were like, especially the military, are people who are going to be away from an

00:25:17 ◼   ► internet connection for a long time, even just people who didn't like the idea of having

00:25:19 ◼   ► to check in.

00:25:21 ◼   ► The fact that you couldn't sell games, game disks to people because the game disk was

00:25:26 ◼   ► just a convenient way for you to get the bits onto your computer and all the rights of the

00:25:29 ◼   ► game had to do with the DRM.

00:25:32 ◼   ► And so if you bought a game in a store and you got the disc,

00:25:35 ◼   ► selling that disc to your friend was pointless

00:25:36 ◼   ► because if they put that disc into their machine,

00:25:38 ◼   ► it would do nothing for them because it would say,

00:25:39 ◼   ► "Oh, you don't own this game

00:25:40 ◼   ► "because you don't have the rights to it

00:25:41 ◼   ► "according to our servers."

00:25:43 ◼   ► And game companies were allowed to not allow their games

00:25:45 ◼   ► to be resold even in digital form.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And so all these things pissed off gamers

00:25:50 ◼   ► and at E3, Sony hammered them in their presentations.

00:25:55 ◼   ► Sony's presentation was all about,

00:25:56 ◼   ► "Look at how much better we are than Microsoft."

00:25:59 ◼   ► And Sony was getting like standing ovations

00:26:01 ◼   ► for standard features of game consoles for the past two decades.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Like, "Oh my God, it's amazing!

00:26:07 ◼   ► I can buy a disc in the store and then sell it to my friend! Woo!"

00:26:10 ◼   ► Anyway, Microsoft was really getting hammered.

00:26:13 ◼   ► I saw one online poll, maybe it was Amazon or some other site.

00:26:17 ◼   ► It was like, "Hey guys, who's thinking about

00:26:20 ◼   ► getting one of the next generation consoles?"

00:26:22 ◼   ► It was just PS4 versus Xbox One, because no one cares about the Wii U.

00:26:28 ◼   ► Normally those polls like on the dawn of a console generation launch are always like

00:26:32 ◼   ► 50/50 each because all the fanboys from both of the consoles go there and they all fill the ballot box and it's like you know

00:26:37 ◼   ► Pretty pretty much a dead heat and this was like not over 90% for the ps4 and like the rest for the Xbox one

00:26:44 ◼   ► So it looks like a blowout and that's just you know, one random poll could have just been a bunch of Sony fans

00:26:49 ◼   ► Who knows but like you never I've never seen that at all the console launches that I've been through

00:26:53 ◼   ► So things were looking bad for Microsoft and what they did which was kind of gutsy but also kind of

00:26:58 ◼   ► Lame and weird or whatever was just reversed everything. It said never never mind

00:27:03 ◼   ► It's exactly like the Xbox 360 you go to the store you buy discs and that's it

00:27:07 ◼   ► You can sell the disc it works exactly like the 360 and they also eliminated all the good features of the Xbox one where you

00:27:13 ◼   ► Know everyone in your family could play the game for free

00:27:15 ◼   ► Even if they didn't live with you like up to ten people in your family could play the game

00:27:18 ◼   ► So if you bought it then like your brother at college automatically got the game for free

00:27:23 ◼   ► he didn't have to buy it again, you didn't have to ship him a disk.

00:27:26 ◼   ► And pure digital downloads now, it's just like the 360 where you can do a digital download,

00:27:30 ◼   ► but if you buy a physical disk, the disk has to be in the drive while you're playing the

00:27:33 ◼   ► game, which sucks and is stupid because why does the disk need to be there?

00:27:36 ◼   ► Oh, it's because they just completely reversed everything they said.

00:27:39 ◼   ► I don't even know how they can do this at this late stage.

00:27:41 ◼   ► It seems like all the deals involved with publishers and all the software involved,

00:27:47 ◼   ► they're a completely reversing course.

00:27:49 ◼   ► And most people are happy about it.

00:27:51 ◼   ► They got rid of the Always Online thing.

00:27:52 ◼   ► They said you have to be online when you set up your Xbox one

00:27:55 ◼   ► But after that you can just be completely offline and as long as the game you're using doesn't need internet connectivity to run

00:28:00 ◼   ► Then you're fine

00:28:02 ◼   ► So this is kind of a mixed bag it it's good in that they reverse their stupid decisions

00:28:08 ◼   ► It's bad and that they got rid of all the things that might have been cool

00:28:12 ◼   ► And I think it's bad like long term because as I think I said when we originally talked about the Xbox one

00:28:16 ◼   ► Everything they were doing

00:28:18 ◼   ► It was done badly, but in broad strokes the idea that you don't own a physical disk instead you own rights to something online

00:28:25 ◼   ► That's good for all the convenience reasons

00:28:27 ◼   ► They just need to get the particulars of it right like once once that's the case you can't you don't use that to then give

00:28:34 ◼   ► The publishers more power and forbid people from reselling games and everything just make it instead

00:28:38 ◼   ► You should say okay now

00:28:39 ◼   ► It's even easier for you to sell a game to your friend sell it through our online thing you don't have to

00:28:43 ◼   ► You know bring the disk over to their house, and you don't have to do any of those stuff

00:28:46 ◼   ► and it's not tied to your account or whatever, you should be able to sell games, sell used

00:28:50 ◼   ► games, resell them, and let Microsoft take a little cut.

00:28:53 ◼   ► I think Apple has shown that people are not opposed to the idea that the middleman gets

00:28:58 ◼   ► some small cut from providing the convenience of buying and selling goods online.

00:29:05 ◼   ► So it's kind of a shame that we've kind of hit the reset button because Microsoft's policies

00:29:09 ◼   ► were so boneheaded, but the overall idea that spinning plastic disks are stupid and should

00:29:14 ◼   ► really just be an accelerated way to download things for you and really the entire marketplace

00:29:19 ◼   ► should be online. I mean Apple's proven. The entire marketplace is being aligned for everything.

00:29:22 ◼   ► For their desktop operating systems, for their desktop software, for their handheld software.

00:29:25 ◼   ► That model works. People like it. It's great. And Apple's taken 30%. I mean Microsoft could take

00:29:30 ◼   ► like 5% of used game sales and gamers would still love them for the convenience of being able to

00:29:35 ◼   ► one-click sell their game to their friend and get, you know, 10 bucks back or whatever.

00:29:41 ◼   ► So that's the story. I'm kind of sad about it. I was never gonna buy an Xbox One anyway.

00:29:45 ◼   ► It's just kind of sad to see Microsoft backpedal like that, when really what they could have done

00:29:49 ◼   ► is just fixed everything and kept the good and just got rid of the bad.

00:29:52 ◼   ► So thumbs up on this? I mean, it sounds like you are not pleased with this,

00:29:57 ◼   ► but you are pleased with where it ended?

00:29:59 ◼   ► It's better than what they had before. What they had before was just a terrible policy

00:30:04 ◼   ► that everyone hated. They just threw out the baby with the bathwater. And, you know,

00:30:08 ◼   ► Like, I like them trying to make progress.

00:30:11 ◼   ► They just went a little bit off in the wrong direction.

00:30:14 ◼   ► And their correction was history eraser button.

00:30:17 ◼   ► This never happened.

00:30:18 ◼   ► This thing just behaves like the Xbox 360.

00:30:20 ◼   ► Never mind, guys.

00:30:21 ◼   ► Marco, you want to talk to us about Squarespace?

00:30:25 ◼   ► I would love to talk to you about Squarespace.

00:30:27 ◼   ► This episode is brought to you, in fact, by Squarespace.

00:30:30 ◼   ► They have the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website.

00:30:34 ◼   ► For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP6 for Accidental Tech

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00:30:47 ◼   ► They have beautiful designs for you to start with and tons of style options for you to

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00:31:00 ◼   ► mobile design so it looks great on any device.

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00:31:07 ◼   ► works 24/7.

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00:31:13 ◼   ► sign up for a year in advance.

00:31:16 ◼   ► As we said earlier, you can try Squarespace for free, no credit card required.

00:31:19 ◼   ► That's really nice.

00:31:21 ◼   ► You don't have to give them a credit card to start your trial, and then if you forget

00:31:23 ◼   ► to cancel it, they bill you.

00:31:24 ◼   ► No, no, no, it's not like that at all.

00:31:27 ◼   ► Free trial, no credit card required.

00:31:29 ◼   ► If you purchase, make sure you get 10% off and support our show by using the coupon code

00:31:33 ◼   ► ATP6.

00:31:36 ◼   ► Squarespace is everything you need to create an exceptional website.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring.

00:31:40 ◼   ► Yeah, and I mean, our site is run on Squarespace and neutrals, and we've never had not one

00:31:45 ◼   ► hiccup.

00:31:46 ◼   ► It's great.

00:31:47 ◼   ► Wait, has that worked?

00:31:48 ◼   ► Never had not one?

00:31:49 ◼   ► You know what I meant.

00:31:50 ◼   ► I'm getting more and more southern with each passing day.

00:31:52 ◼   ► It's not terrible.

00:31:53 ◼   ► It's just different.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Well, you have to offset us.

00:31:55 ◼   ► Yeah, well, that's true.

00:31:56 ◼   ► So I want to talk about iOS 7 a little bit, and we have a couple of things in our accidental

00:32:02 ◼   ► show notes.

00:32:03 ◼   ► And I want to go off the rails a little bit, and I want to actually go back to ATP episode

00:32:08 ◼   ► 1.

00:32:09 ◼   ► And the reason I want to do that is because ATP episode 1, before it was really a podcast

00:32:15 ◼   ► at all, was the three of us talking about an iPhone Plus.

00:32:20 ◼   ► And we were talking about how one could extrapolate and theorize what size it would be, whether

00:32:26 ◼   ► or not it would exist, et cetera.

00:32:28 ◼   ► And one of the things that's been bugging me

00:32:30 ◼   ► in a good way about what we saw during the keynote

00:32:35 ◼   ► was that gestures are a big deal in iOS 7.

00:32:38 ◼   ► And specifically, there's a gesture

00:32:40 ◼   ► to go back a screen in iOS 7.

00:32:43 ◼   ► And there's been a lot of talk about gestures in iOS 7.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And the thing that struck me about the gesture

00:32:48 ◼   ► to go back a screen is if it's very easy, kind of system-wide,

00:32:52 ◼   ► to go back one level, it may not be so terrible to have a back button that, at least for right-handed

00:33:00 ◼   ► people, is too far away. So, in other words, if you look at the iPhone 5, for most normal-sized

00:33:07 ◼   ► people, the back button is—and normal-sized right-handed people—the back button is way

00:33:12 ◼   ► up and to the left and is a little bit of a stretch to reach. Well, what if you didn't

00:33:16 ◼   ► have to reach that anymore? Then could the phone—would that be enough to make it not

00:33:21 ◼   ► annoying to have a bigger phone. Does that make sense?

00:33:24 ◼   ► Well, first of all, I think that you... it sounds like you're saying that right-handed

00:33:28 ◼   ► people have to hold their phone in their right hand.

00:33:31 ◼   ► That's true, and obviously, well, that was the assumption, but you're already making

00:33:34 ◼   ► a great point.

00:33:35 ◼   ► What's wrong? What? You do that?

00:33:38 ◼   ► I hold my phone in my right hand.

00:33:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I hold my phone in my right hand.

00:33:41 ◼   ► That's crazy talk!

00:33:42 ◼   ► Well, I mean, I don't have a phone, but you know what I mean. I hold my iPod touch in

00:33:44 ◼   ► my right hand. I mean, I do it lefty too, but...

00:33:46 ◼   ► You guys are nuts.

00:33:47 ◼   ► Well, think about the slide to open. How do you do that with your left hand?

00:33:51 ◼   ► That's weird. My left thumb. No, it works much better when you're

00:33:55 ◼   ► pulling your thumb towards them when you're extending your thumb out. Agreed.

00:33:59 ◼   ► You guys are nuts. Well, I think what's interesting also, and

00:34:03 ◼   ► I don't know, this might

00:34:07 ◼   ► I think I can safely say without violating the NDA

00:34:11 ◼   ► I don't think anyone's going to complain if I say that auto layout has been

00:34:15 ◼   ► heavily encouraged. And so you look at a few things. You look at that they're really pushing

00:34:22 ◼   ► you to use auto layout. And the new design of iOS 7 even, and the designs they're kind

00:34:30 ◼   ► of encouraging by example in the apps of things like shirping away ornamentation and big heavy

00:34:35 ◼   ► textures and everything else, the designs are probably pretty stretchable. And more

00:34:41 ◼   ► so than they used to be. You know, where it used to have, it used to be back before the

00:34:45 ◼   ► iPhone 5 that you could design like the old Tapbots apps before Tweetbot, it was like

00:34:52 ◼   ► Convertbot and stuff like that, where you could basically design a 320x480 screen and

00:34:58 ◼   ► that was it. That was your whole app. You could just design this one big bitmap because

00:35:02 ◼   ► you only had one screen size to deal with.

00:35:05 ◼   ► It was like web development with tables when you'd slice up everything into images and

00:35:09 ◼   ► to make everything about tables.

00:35:10 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:35:10 ◼   ► And iOS 7 is responsive design.

00:35:12 ◼   ► Exactly, yeah.

00:35:13 ◼   ► Like, iOS 7 is-- like, the visual style

00:35:17 ◼   ► they're going for-- you know, first the iPhone 5

00:35:19 ◼   ► told everyone, oh, crap.

00:35:20 ◼   ► You know, if your app is not just like a scrolling view

00:35:24 ◼   ► with bars on top and bottom, this

00:35:26 ◼   ► is going to be non-trivial to do.

00:35:28 ◼   ► But now I think the encouragement

00:35:32 ◼   ► to use auto layout, plus this back gesture,

00:35:36 ◼   ► plus the whole style of iOS 7 being so flexible, I think, more easily and breaking fewer things

00:35:45 ◼   ► visually. I think that all is, if not pointing to different iPhone screen sizes, I think

00:35:52 ◼   ► it would at least pave the way to make that a lot easier to do if they chose to. And reading

00:35:58 ◼   ► the tea leaves a little bit, it would not surprise me at all if they did a new iPhone

00:36:03 ◼   ► this fall that was, and maybe they do more than one,

00:36:07 ◼   ► but we talked before, I think they need a bigger screen

00:36:11 ◼   ► iPhone, because whatever Tim Cook says about the displays,

00:36:15 ◼   ► whatever people who are big Apple fans say about phone

00:36:19 ◼   ► sizes, the fact is the market is demanding them significantly.

00:36:23 ◼   ► And Apple is losing a lot of the high-end market,

00:36:27 ◼   ► which is the profitable market. They're losing a lot of that high-end market by

00:36:31 ◼   ► not having a larger screen phone.

00:36:34 ◼   ► - I saw a monstrous phone today.

00:36:35 ◼   ► I'm assuming it was a Samsung,

00:36:36 ◼   ► and it was in the hands of a young child,

00:36:38 ◼   ► and it just made it look even bigger.

00:36:40 ◼   ► It was like comically, yeah.

00:36:41 ◼   ► I guess it had to be one of those note things,

00:36:43 ◼   ► but it was ridiculous.

00:36:44 ◼   ► It looked like an iPad mini.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a bunch of things in iOS 7

00:36:47 ◼   ► that lend itself to this.

00:36:49 ◼   ► Even like the lock screen with the gesture for swiping,

00:36:52 ◼   ► where you don't have to swipe in that one particular region,

00:36:53 ◼   ► you can swipe anywhere.

00:36:55 ◼   ► The icons in the home screen are bigger.

00:36:57 ◼   ► So, I mean, anything they make bigger,

00:37:00 ◼   ► you're like, oh, well, this will look more normal on a larger size.

00:37:03 ◼   ► Even in the navigation bar, the text that's in the buttons that would say the word "back"

00:37:08 ◼   ► for the back button, that text is larger because the buttons don't have borders around them.

00:37:13 ◼   ► And anything that they make larger, you think, okay, well, when this is on a larger phone,

00:37:17 ◼   ► it will fit in better there.

00:37:19 ◼   ► It's not going to complete extremes because they do have the adjustable text sizing.

00:37:22 ◼   ► Did they show that in the keynote?

00:37:23 ◼   ► I hope so.

00:37:24 ◼   ► I just broke it in the A.

00:37:25 ◼   ► I thought they did.

00:37:26 ◼   ► But whatever.

00:37:28 ◼   ► adjustable text sizing doesn't actually alter the size of things like navigation elements,

00:37:33 ◼   ► because that would force people to use auto layout.

00:37:34 ◼   ► You really use auto layout.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Right, like the bar metrics are all, I think, permanent.

00:37:38 ◼   ► Right, but like I said, the button text is bigger.

00:37:41 ◼   ► So they're trying to strike a balance.

00:37:42 ◼   ► They don't want everything to be bigger, because then it would look wrong on the smaller phone.

00:37:45 ◼   ► They don't want everything to scale, because that will make app development a nightmare.

00:37:48 ◼   ► But you know, auto layout combined with larger icons, combined with bigger text on the navigation,

00:37:52 ◼   ► but with the same nav bar sizes and all that stuff, it's like, I mean, as we were discussing

00:37:57 ◼   ► in the first episode of ATP, we don't expect a humongously bigger phone, just a little

00:38:01 ◼   ► bit bigger, and bigger in two dimensions.

00:38:05 ◼   ► And so I think iOS 7 is perfectly suited for an ever so slightly bigger iPhone that both

00:38:09 ◼   ► has a slightly higher resolution and also like a lower dot per inch, because then you

00:38:13 ◼   ► could, you know, those two factors combine, those two relatively small factors combine,

00:38:18 ◼   ► give you a phone that is bigger than the iPhone 5, but is not comically large.

00:38:23 ◼   ► Right, and before, when we were talking about this,

00:38:26 ◼   ► whenever that was, like five months ago,

00:38:28 ◼   ► or whatever that was, I had my theory about,

00:38:31 ◼   ► well, they can keep the same resolution,

00:38:33 ◼   ► just make everything a little bit bigger,

00:38:35 ◼   ► and everyone would be fine with that.

00:38:37 ◼   ► Now, I'm not so sure that's the case.

00:38:39 ◼   ► I think you're right that they could just increase

00:38:41 ◼   ► the resolution a little bit, and just make the panel,

00:38:44 ◼   ► give us, what is it now, four inches diagonal?

00:38:47 ◼   ► Give us maybe like a five inch one,

00:38:49 ◼   ► or even four and a half inch would look substantially larger.

00:38:52 ◼   ► larger. And I think they could do that and even just scale the resolution up proportionally

00:38:58 ◼   ► if they really want to. And I think now they're obviously preparing for non-fixed resolution

00:39:07 ◼   ► iPhones, if that makes sense. Or rather, for multiple sizes of iPhones. I think the pieces

00:39:13 ◼   ► are in place now that the T-leads are starting to line up to say, "This is probably where

00:39:18 ◼   ► they're heading."

00:39:19 ◼   ► It still doesn't quite address the Andy and Nocko issue that I think we discussed in that

00:39:22 ◼   ► first episode, which is that the reason he loves Android phones with larger screens is

00:39:25 ◼   ► not just that it's larger, which I think is at least half of it, but there's another part

00:39:29 ◼   ► of it is that Android phones, when running on larger screen, or Android software running

00:39:34 ◼   ► on larger screen phones, put up more UI, and a miniature version of what iPad version of

00:39:40 ◼   ► apps do.

00:39:41 ◼   ► Because once you have the iPad version, "Oh, I've got all this space, I can have a totally

00:39:43 ◼   ► different UI," well, a slightly bigger phone, if it's bigger enough, maybe you have room

00:39:48 ◼   ► room for a toolbar and before you didn't. Maybe you have room for one more toolbar button.

00:39:52 ◼   ► There are things that you can do to actually give you an application that doesn't just

00:39:55 ◼   ► give you more viewable area for your content, which is great and everything, and doesn't

00:39:58 ◼   ► just have larger text sizes and larger buttons, but also says, "Oh, this is room for a little

00:40:02 ◼   ► bit more information and maybe a feature that didn't fit on the phone can fit there." I

00:40:06 ◼   ► don't know if Apple's phone would be bigger enough to even give you one more toolbar icon

00:40:11 ◼   ► for the space or one more toolbar word in the new world of iOS 7 where they like to

00:40:15 ◼   ► words sometimes instead of icons, but it's possible. It's possible that applications,

00:40:20 ◼   ► like you've got optimized for iPad, right? So it's a totally different application, basically,

00:40:24 ◼   ► even though under the covers it might be very similar, but the UI can be very different.

00:40:27 ◼   ► And then you have your iPhone 5 size version of it, and then you have your iPhone 6 Plus

00:40:32 ◼   ► or whatever, where you get one more toolbar icon, or you didn't have a toolbar before

00:40:36 ◼   ► and now you do, or you have another little row of things on the right side or something

00:40:39 ◼   ► like that. I would really be interested in seeing that, but that's the last piece of

00:40:42 ◼   ► the puzzle. I don't think that's necessary. I think simply making a larger screen is plenty.

00:40:47 ◼   ► Bigger resolution, larger everything. People will still love that. But if it's possible

00:40:52 ◼   ► to optimize your app for it, the apps that do that to provide a little bit more UI and

00:40:56 ◼   ► features, I think that will be the icing on the cake.

00:40:59 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll see what happens. I just thought it was interesting that all the signs are

00:41:04 ◼   ► pointing more towards yes. And that gesture, I don't know why, but for me it really made

00:41:09 ◼   ► me think, you know what, this iPhone Plus or whatever they're going to call it, that

00:41:12 ◼   ► really could be a thing.

00:41:14 ◼   ► The other thing that's been noodling at me all week since I left the keynote was their

00:41:19 ◼   ► talk about iOS version adoption.

00:41:22 ◼   ► And the general gist of it is that, oh, everyone upgrades to the latest version of iOS immediately.

00:41:27 ◼   ► And of course, immediately is defined as a few weeks or whatever the case may be.

00:41:32 ◼   ► But people upgrade to the latest version of iOS very quickly.

00:41:35 ◼   ► And that's generally true, especially on point releases.

00:41:38 ◼   ► But what occurred to me was, I remember reading David Smith's iOS version stats and seeing

00:41:44 ◼   ► that adoption of iOS 6 was not that quick at all because everyone was freaking out about

00:41:49 ◼   ► Apple Maps.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Well, I think that's actually not supported by the data.

00:41:54 ◼   ► Oh yeah?

00:41:55 ◼   ► That's a very, very common theory.

00:41:58 ◼   ► But like, so basically the theory was, okay, everyone's holding back because they don't

00:42:03 ◼   ► want iOS 6 maps, etc.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And then the theory was that once Google Maps app comes out,

00:42:10 ◼   ► then you should see a big bump in 6 adoption.

00:42:13 ◼   ► And you didn't.

00:42:14 ◼   ► Like there was almost no change in the rate of adoption

00:42:17 ◼   ► when the Google Maps app came out for iOS.

00:42:22 ◼   ► And so it looks like that probably was not the reason.

00:42:26 ◼   ► I mean, for me, I think the biggest reason

00:42:28 ◼   ► why iOS 6 adoption-- I think it climbed

00:42:31 ◼   ► at a relatively normal rate.

00:42:33 ◼   ► And then it just kind of peaked at like 92 or whatever percent

00:42:36 ◼   ► that it is now.

00:42:37 ◼   ► And if you look, iOS 5 adoption-- like iOS 4 adoption

00:42:41 ◼   ► has shrunk proportionally, as you'd expect.

00:42:43 ◼   ► iOS 5 adoption has kind of hit a wall.

00:42:46 ◼   ► And my theory there is all about the iPad 1.

00:42:49 ◼   ► Granted, Apple has sold a lot more devices

00:42:55 ◼   ► that run everything else than the iPad 1.

00:42:57 ◼   ► But there still are a lot of iPad 1s in use.

00:43:01 ◼   ► because the iPad 1 was sold until like what, two and a half years ago?

00:43:05 ◼   ► Like it wasn't that long ago that it was still sold

00:43:08 ◼   ► and people were buying this like $500+ computer type device.

00:43:15 ◼   ► And it's not on a contract, it's not subsidized,

00:43:19 ◼   ► so they expect that to last more than two years.

00:43:23 ◼   ► So there are still a lot of iPad 1s in use that can't run iOS 6

00:43:27 ◼   ► And I don't know how much of the percentage of people still on five that represents. Probably

00:43:33 ◼   ► not even the majority of it, but I bet that's like a big solid chunk in there that just

00:43:38 ◼   ► is not going away anytime soon.

00:43:41 ◼   ► And you know what, you're probably right. I just know whether or not it was dated back

00:43:45 ◼   ► or not, maybe I made that up. But certainly anecdotally, I know a lot of my mildly nerdy

00:43:51 ◼   ► friends had said, "Oh, I can't get that new Apple Maps thing. It's terrible. I won't have

00:43:55 ◼   ► And either way, I mean, I was just trying to build up to the question, not argument,

00:43:59 ◼   ► of what do we think about iOS 7 adoption?

00:44:02 ◼   ► Do we think it'll be quick?

00:44:03 ◼   ► Do we think it'll be really, really slow by comparison to other versions of iOS?

00:44:07 ◼   ► My inclination is I feel like it will be kind of in the middle, which is, of course, the

00:44:13 ◼   ► worst hedging ever.

00:44:15 ◼   ► But I really think it'll be less quick than a lot of the less remarkable major releases.

00:44:21 ◼   ► But I think a lot of people are going to really like it.

00:44:23 ◼   ► And I think that, yeah, I think it'll be all right,

00:44:26 ◼   ► but I'm curious to hear what you guys think.

00:44:28 ◼   ► - I think it'll probably be driven,

00:44:30 ◼   ► like a lot of these things are,

00:44:31 ◼   ► they're driven and aided by the fact

00:44:33 ◼   ► that Apple continues to sell more and more phones.

00:44:35 ◼   ► Now, granted, the growth rate has leveled off a little bit,

00:44:38 ◼   ► but assuming iOS 7 launches with a new phone,

00:44:43 ◼   ► like, and the new phone's gonna come with iOS 7,

00:44:47 ◼   ► and people will very quickly stop buying the old one,

00:44:49 ◼   ► and so you get this immediate boost

00:44:51 ◼   ► just like all the iPhone 5s or 6 or whatever the heck it is, especially if it's an iPhone

00:44:56 ◼   ► 6.

00:44:57 ◼   ► If they don't do a 5s and it's actually a different form factor, and if it's like a

00:44:59 ◼   ► bigger one or something, that will give iOS 7 a huge boost out of the gate and skew the

00:45:05 ◼   ► statistics.

00:45:06 ◼   ► But I have to think that the adoption will probably be about the same as it was for 6,

00:45:11 ◼   ► if only because that thing where they push the updates at you...

00:45:15 ◼   ► I mean, I know iOS 7's going to have automatic updates, and same for Mavericks and everything.

00:45:19 ◼   ► Again, I think these are in the keynote.

00:45:23 ◼   ► That will drive adoption going forward even more.

00:45:26 ◼   ► But even just the current model where they're like, "Hey, there's a new version of iOS.

00:45:29 ◼   ► Do you want to upgrade?" and people hit a button and then it does it, that's what's

00:45:33 ◼   ► driving all this adoption.

00:45:34 ◼   ► It's like Jeff Atwood's post from, I guess it's years ago at this point, of the infinite

00:45:40 ◼   ► version.

00:45:41 ◼   ► Google Chrome is one of the pioneers in this where you don't do anything, you don't have

00:45:45 ◼   ► to make any choices, you use it and if you don't know anything about it, if you use it

00:45:50 ◼   ► and quit that program and relaunch it, it is updating itself, unbeknownst to you. They'll

00:45:53 ◼   ► put a little colored arrow or whatever in the toolbar and if you notice that you can

00:45:57 ◼   ► go, "Oh, I can update Google Chrome now," or whatever. It used to be more intrusive.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Now it's just like, "Look, we're going to update your Google Chrome. There's nothing

00:46:03 ◼   ► you can do about it." I mean, maybe there is some way to stop it, but the defaults are

00:46:07 ◼   ► you're going to get updated. What version of Google Chrome you're using? Who knows?

00:46:11 ◼   ► The latest. That is the idea that you don't have versions of software that you get confused

00:46:15 ◼   ► comfortable with, like where you buy a 2002 car.

00:46:18 ◼   ► Sorry about the cars again.

00:46:19 ◼   ► And you're like, oh, I'm happy with this car.

00:46:21 ◼   ► If you went out in your driveway and it was replaced with a 2003

00:46:23 ◼   ► model, you'd be like, but I like the 2002 one.

00:46:25 ◼   ► I like the way the shifter worked,

00:46:26 ◼   ► and the seat fabric was nicer, and the radio controls were

00:46:29 ◼   ► better.

00:46:29 ◼   ► You just get used to what you have.

00:46:31 ◼   ► And software in the past has been like that,

00:46:33 ◼   ► where you get Photoshop version 3.0,

00:46:37 ◼   ► and you're like, oh, wow, layers, this is awesome.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And this program is great.

00:46:40 ◼   ► And then 4.0 comes out, and you're like,

00:46:42 ◼   ► oh, that's just weird.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I don't like it.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Actually, I should have done 2.5 to 3,

00:46:45 ◼   ► because maybe you like channel operations and not layers.

00:46:47 ◼   ► But anyway, you get used to a piece of software,

00:46:50 ◼   ► and you say, OK, well, this is the software.

00:46:53 ◼   ► And it continues to work, and I like it.

00:46:55 ◼   ► Why would I ever want it to change?

00:46:57 ◼   ► And if it changed underneath you, you're like, whoa,

00:46:58 ◼   ► what's this?

00:46:59 ◼   ► The menus change, and the keyboard shortcuts change,

00:47:01 ◼   ► and they change all sorts of things about this program.

00:47:03 ◼   ► What happened to my old program?

00:47:04 ◼   ► I want that one back.

00:47:06 ◼   ► Because you think of software as this one thing

00:47:08 ◼   ► that you get, like a physical thing, like a car.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Whereas with Chrome, you've shown

00:47:13 ◼   ► people can be trained not to think of software that way.

00:47:16 ◼   ► If you use Chrome, the program that you're using now is not like the one you were using

00:47:19 ◼   ► several years ago, and you didn't do anything about that.

00:47:22 ◼   ► You could have just never touched any button, never said yes to any updates, it just updates

00:47:25 ◼   ► itself.

00:47:27 ◼   ► And you come in and you're like, "Oh, Chrome is different today."

00:47:28 ◼   ► And for the most part, it's different, it's faster, it's better, it's more stable, it

00:47:31 ◼   ► has more features.

00:47:33 ◼   ► But also, it changes stuff.

00:47:34 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, the menus are different, and the preferences are different."

00:47:37 ◼   ► On the Mac version, things kept moving into browser tabs and out of real UI as they tried

00:47:42 ◼   ► to make everything web-based and that kind of annoyed me.

00:47:45 ◼   ► But I think that's the future of software and that's what's driving this adoption.

00:47:50 ◼   ► More than people saying, "Oh, iOS is 6, I want to get it."

00:47:53 ◼   ► It's because every single iOS device that can upgrade to iOS 6 showed a prompt that

00:47:57 ◼   ► says, "Do you want to upgrade to iOS 6?"

00:47:59 ◼   ► And it showed it again.

00:48:00 ◼   ► And I don't know how persistent it is, but people eventually hit the button.

00:48:03 ◼   ► Android has eight bazillion ancient versions because those phones can't even run.

00:48:06 ◼   ► Like, you know, it's up to the carriers to upgrade them and they're like, "Ah, screw

00:48:09 ◼   ► it, we're not doing anything."

00:48:10 ◼   ► If all those phones had little prompts, they'd all be running the latest version of Android

00:48:13 ◼   ► too, but they can't and they don't have those prompts, so they're not.

00:48:16 ◼   ► Well, and also, I mean, one of the biggest things, like you touched on earlier, one of

00:48:21 ◼   ► the biggest things driving iOS adoption is that all new iOS devices are always sold with

00:48:26 ◼   ► the latest OS.

00:48:28 ◼   ► And because the sales of iOS devices tend to still be growing quarter by quarter or

00:48:33 ◼   ► year by year, every year there's way more iOS devices added into the pool of actively

00:48:40 ◼   ► used devices and everything added past an OS's release date has the newest OS. Whereas

00:48:46 ◼   ► Android, you still have phones that are sold today that are running not the current version

00:48:51 ◼   ► of the OS. And sometimes they're running versions that are like six months or a year or even

00:48:55 ◼   ► more old. So iOS, as long as sales of iOS devices stay strong and you remain not able

00:49:03 ◼   ► to downgrade them, I think we're always going to see very, very strong version adoption.

00:49:08 ◼   ► Yeah, Apple had some stuff that I can't remember.

00:49:10 ◼   ► It was something like, you know, the number of iOS devices sold in the past year is more

00:49:14 ◼   ► than the number of iOS devices sold in all of history before that, or something like

00:49:18 ◼   ► that.

00:49:19 ◼   ► Right, and they've claimed that a lot, because in many years that is the case.

00:49:24 ◼   ► Right, I mean, growth has leveled off a little bit, so maybe they won't be able to claim

00:49:28 ◼   ► that next year, but that combined with the fact that they can upgrade, and like you said,

00:49:32 ◼   ► all the new versions, all the new hardware comes with the newest version, that drives

00:49:36 ◼   ► adoption.

00:49:37 ◼   ► it as a point like, "Our adoption is great because users really love our latest version

00:49:42 ◼   ► of the OS." And I don't really think it's the case. Not that it matters, but iOS 7 will

00:49:47 ◼   ► freak people out. But they're going to upgrade it anyway because the button's going to come

00:49:50 ◼   ► on the screen and they're going to press it and they can't downgrade. And it's going to

00:49:53 ◼   ► come on their new—when their contract expires, it's going to come on their new iPhone. So

00:49:57 ◼   ► guess what? 90% adoption. All right, I have more to say on that, but

00:50:01 ◼   ► first let me break for a minute to talk about our second sponsor for today. It's An Event

00:50:05 ◼   ► They are the design conference for people who make websites.

00:50:09 ◼   ► They have upcoming events in San Diego, Boston, Washington, D.C.,

00:50:13 ◼   ► Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco.

00:50:17 ◼   ► An event apart is founded by web visionaries Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman.

00:50:21 ◼   ► They're dedicated to the proposition that the creators of great web experiences

00:50:25 ◼   ► deserve a great learning experience. They bring together 12 leading minds

00:50:29 ◼   ► in web design for two days of non-stop inspiration and enlightenment,

00:50:33 ◼   ► plus an optional day-long workshop on multi-device web design.

00:50:37 ◼   ► So if you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design,

00:50:42 ◼   ► an Event Apart is the conference you've been waiting for.

00:50:45 ◼   ► Go to an eventapart.com/atpfm.

00:50:49 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to an Event Apart for sponsoring the show.

00:50:52 ◼   ► I'm sad I can't go to that this year.

00:50:54 ◼   ► I tried to get finagle work into paying for me to go, but no luck.

00:50:58 ◼   ► Oh well, maybe next time.

00:51:00 ◼   ► So, back to iOS 7 for a minute.

00:51:05 ◼   ► So, you know, WBC happened, we did our show and we all gave our opinion of it.

00:51:09 ◼   ► Then I went home and I showed my wife the beta on my iPhone 4S.

00:51:15 ◼   ► And her immediate reaction was, ew, this looks really cheap.

00:51:20 ◼   ► You know, looking at the home screen, looking at those often terrible icons, like, she really

00:51:25 ◼   ► was very turned off by the appearance of the home screen.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And I think it was mostly because of the crappy icons.

00:51:33 ◼   ► And her initial experience was, I don't really

00:51:35 ◼   ► want to keep using this.

00:51:36 ◼   ► Like, I don't really want to play with this.

00:51:38 ◼   ► This is kind of gross, and I'm a little scared

00:51:40 ◼   ► of where they're going here.

00:51:42 ◼   ► And she played with it for another couple of minutes

00:51:45 ◼   ► at my urging.

00:51:48 ◼   ► And then later on that evening, she's

00:51:50 ◼   ► using her regular iPhone with iOS 6 on it.

00:51:54 ◼   ► And she's like, you know what?

00:51:55 ◼   ► This looks old.

00:51:58 ◼   ► And she's like, you know, I actually, I want the new one.

00:52:03 ◼   ► And I want a white iPhone now.

00:52:07 ◼   ► Because the current one's black.

00:52:08 ◼   ► The worst part of iOS 7 is it encourages people

00:52:11 ◼   ► to buy white iOS devices.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And I couldn't agree more.

00:52:14 ◼   ► I bet that's-- first of all, actually, I

00:52:16 ◼   ► have a white iPad Mini.

00:52:17 ◼   ► Because the new style-- so I have a black iPhone 5.

00:52:21 ◼   ► But I think, ultimately, I think the black aluminum is not

00:52:25 ◼   ► aging well.

00:52:26 ◼   ► The edges get the scratches.

00:52:28 ◼   ► and you can start seeing the color underneath.

00:52:30 ◼   ► And I don't know.

00:52:32 ◼   ► I'm not crazy about the way the black ones look in practice.

00:52:36 ◼   ► But anyway, I think this is going

00:52:39 ◼   ► to probably reflect a lot of people's opinion of iOS 7,

00:52:42 ◼   ► because when you first see it, you're kind of like, huh,

00:52:45 ◼   ► that home screen's kind of ugly looking.

00:52:49 ◼   ► But then once the whole OS sinks in,

00:52:52 ◼   ► and once you start to use it, you start to realize, OK, well,

00:52:55 ◼   ► some of those home screen decisions are pretty bad.

00:52:57 ◼   ► But overall, this really does look very modern, and it starts to really show you how dated

00:53:04 ◼   ► the old iOS appearance has become.

00:53:08 ◼   ► So did Tiff get deeper than just looking at the home screen?

00:53:11 ◼   ► Like, did she actually play with a few apps?

00:53:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I opened up Calendar and Mail and stuff like that.

00:53:15 ◼   ► I didn't have any third-party apps really installed on it, but I opened up a few built-in

00:53:19 ◼   ► stuff and she was poking around with that.

00:53:22 ◼   ► It was not a very long interaction, I will give you that.

00:53:25 ◼   ► But just having seen that, and only having seen that for a few minutes, she was then

00:53:34 ◼   ► able to recognize, "Oh crap, my current iPhone looks old by comparison."

00:53:40 ◼   ► And so she wanted the new one, just because it really is new and fresh and modern.

00:53:46 ◼   ► And I really think that's going to be a very common reaction.

00:53:50 ◼   ► Well, and I know Tiff pretty well, and she doesn't strike me as the "ooh, shiny"

00:53:56 ◼   ► kind of person, but is that going to be the reaction from your average Joe or Susie that

00:54:03 ◼   ► it's just new and shiny, or do you think it's deeper than that?

00:54:06 ◼   ► I happen to think it's deeper than that, but I'm a nerd, and so that's not unexpected.

00:54:10 ◼   ► I think it's going to be shocking to people who aren't paying attention.

00:54:14 ◼   ► They're going to be like, "Well, this doesn't look like my iOS," but at that

00:54:19 ◼   ► point they will have no choice and they will use it for a week and get used to it and three

00:54:24 ◼   ► or four things will continue to annoy them just like three or four things annoy them

00:54:27 ◼   ► about the old one but they'll get used to it.

00:54:30 ◼   ► It's going to be a differentiator.

00:54:33 ◼   ► That's the most important feature of this change from the regular person's perspective

00:54:38 ◼   ► is that it is unmistakably different than the previous one and as I said in the past

00:54:42 ◼   ► podcast, Apple needed to make a change.

00:54:45 ◼   ► is a change, that is an essential feature of this that customers can identify at a glance

00:54:50 ◼   ► that is different. Because that's what iOS needs at this point. It needs a clean break

00:54:55 ◼   ► with the past and something new. And as long as it's not completely unusable or just seen

00:55:01 ◼   ► as horrendously ugly, it'll be fine. I mean, think about Windows 8, which I think has some

00:55:05 ◼   ► horrendously ugly parts of it, but that's not what annoyed people. People weren't

00:55:08 ◼   ► more annoyed that Windows 8 was ugly. They were annoyed they couldn't find anything and

00:55:11 ◼   ► nothing worked and stuff like that. So as long as Apple gets the functionality part

00:55:14 ◼   ► of it right, and I think they're on the right track there, the individual decisions

00:55:20 ◼   ► about aesthetics are not as important as the fact that it is just immediately identifiable

00:55:27 ◼   ► as a different thing.

00:55:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's right. And the fact is, it still does work roughly the same way.

00:55:35 ◼   ► There are a few little tweaks here and there, and there's slightly more updated or more

00:55:40 ◼   ► modern things like the back gesture, a more updated navigation structure and stuff like

00:55:46 ◼   ► that, but it all still works pretty much the same way.

00:55:51 ◼   ► And for people who have never seen the multitasking bar in iOS 6, they will continue to not see

00:55:56 ◼   ► it in iOS 7 and they won't notice that it's any different.

00:56:00 ◼   ► We look at every single thing that's different because we know every nook and cranny of iOS,

00:56:03 ◼   ► but I even wonder about, I mean, it kind of explains why Apple put that little upward-facing

00:56:08 ◼   ► arrow to say "hey guys, control center is down here" and it's a convenient way for you

00:56:12 ◼   ► to change stuff.

00:56:13 ◼   ► But that's another one of those features.

00:56:16 ◼   ► Maybe it's like notification center where the first time most people activate notification

00:56:19 ◼   ► center it's probably an accident and they're like "what's this thing?

00:56:22 ◼   ► I was in this app and this little thing peaked down from the top for a second and then I

00:56:25 ◼   ► went back to using it.

00:56:26 ◼   ► What is that?

00:56:27 ◼   ► And I did another app and this thing is up there!"

00:56:29 ◼   ► Eventually people will discover this thing down there but unlike probably notification

00:56:33 ◼   ► center, once people discover control center they'll be like "oh, fast way to turn Wi-Fi

00:56:37 ◼   ► on and off, like things that people can understand, you know, or change the volume or whatever.

00:56:43 ◼   ► I'm hoping that that will be a feature that people will latch onto.

00:56:47 ◼   ► For the people, again, for the people who don't know that you can open the multitasking

00:56:50 ◼   ► tray and go to the left and there's stuff over there that's useful, right?

00:56:53 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

00:56:54 ◼   ► Control Center is the much larger, nicer version of that.

00:56:58 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:56:59 ◼   ► I mean, we—so I got my mother-in-law for this past Christmas.

00:57:04 ◼   ► She has this nice radio, this nice little radio thing in their living room, and she's

00:57:11 ◼   ► been using the iPad and she was getting it to Pandora.

00:57:13 ◼   ► So I got her an airport express so that she could then airplay the Pandora to the little

00:57:18 ◼   ► radio in the living room.

00:57:21 ◼   ► And having to describe to a relatively non-technical person all the steps involved in turning on

00:57:28 ◼   ► it, because of course Pandora on the iPad doesn't have an AirPlay button because their

00:57:32 ◼   ► their apps are extraordinarily mediocre,

00:57:34 ◼   ► but trying to explain to a regular person

00:57:38 ◼   ► how to go to the multitasking tray,

00:57:41 ◼   ► swipe over, find the AirPlay button, tap that,

00:57:44 ◼   ► tap the room, like now, it's swipe up, tap AirPlay.

00:57:47 ◼   ► Like there's like three fewer steps than there were before,

00:57:50 ◼   ► and it's way more clear.

00:57:52 ◼   ► And there's gonna be so many interactions like that

00:57:54 ◼   ► that are just so much easier with that.

00:57:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the other thing I wanted to note

00:57:59 ◼   ► was if you look at Apple's iOS 7 page, there's the big image of a white iPhone 5 with the

00:58:07 ◼   ► home screen.

00:58:08 ◼   ► There's a couple paragraphs of text, and then there's, what is this, 3, 6, 9, 12 images

00:58:14 ◼   ► of all the familiar apps.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Well, they're not images, actually.

00:58:17 ◼   ► I think they're little videos.

00:58:19 ◼   ► But they're all the familiar apps that they're showing.

00:58:23 ◼   ► The headline is "See iOS 7 in Action."

00:58:25 ◼   ► So it's clear that they're trying to—shop isn't the right word—but familiarize people

00:58:30 ◼   ► with what's coming.

00:58:32 ◼   ► So whenever the time comes that iOS 7 is out, then it won't be so jarring.

00:58:37 ◼   ► And I think Apple's a little nervous about it, and I think they should be, but I think

00:58:40 ◼   ► all in all it won't be bad.

00:58:42 ◼   ► Anyway, do we want to talk about Neven Mergen's thing?

00:58:47 ◼   ► I do, I do.

00:58:48 ◼   ► Sure.

00:58:49 ◼   ► Because I put it in the notes, that's why.

00:58:51 ◼   ► You're preparing a little too much, John.

00:58:53 ◼   ► It's one sentence and a link, and it's not even a sentence.

00:58:58 ◼   ► Getting a little nervous.

00:58:59 ◼   ► It's not long.

00:59:00 ◼   ► All right, so Nevin's post is another in a long series

00:59:03 ◼   ► of people with design backgrounds

00:59:06 ◼   ► and not commenting on iOS 7 about what they like,

00:59:09 ◼   ► what they don't like, and trying to divine the philosophy

00:59:12 ◼   ► behind it and reconcile what Apple

00:59:13 ◼   ► has said with the reality of the OS and all that stuff.

00:59:16 ◼   ► And Nevin's post was very focused,

00:59:18 ◼   ► and it's clear that he has chewed

00:59:20 ◼   ► on this design in his head for a long time,

00:59:23 ◼   ► and finally decided that some of it just looks wrong to him.

00:59:26 ◼   ► And he focused on the icons showing--

00:59:28 ◼   ► I think he showed the App Store icon, the little circle.

00:59:31 ◼   ► And the A conforms to the grid that Johnny Ive and his team

00:59:36 ◼   ► supposedly laid out for iOS icons

00:59:37 ◼   ► to make them all look the same, where they have

00:59:40 ◼   ► concentric circles and boxes.

00:59:41 ◼   ► And they made a point of showing how,

00:59:43 ◼   ► even though all the home screen icons look different,

00:59:45 ◼   ► they all sort of touch on important points in this grid

00:59:48 ◼   ► and conform to it in the right way.

00:59:49 ◼   ► And he was saying, but the grid is wrong.

00:59:52 ◼   ► look at that circle in the App Store, if I was designing this, it would be smaller.

00:59:56 ◼   ► And it should be smaller because it looks wrong when it's bigger.

00:59:58 ◼   ► And I read that post and I thought there was a couple of really obvious

01:00:03 ◼   ► RDE design type replies to it.

01:00:06 ◼   ► And I found one of them, I was glad to see someone tackle a lot of it.

01:00:09 ◼   ► This is from Ari Warner. We'll have his links in the show notes.

01:00:13 ◼   ► This is up on Medium, a site which I don't really like the URLs from

01:00:16 ◼   ► because you can't read them. But anyway, he responded to Nevin's post explaining how

01:00:20 ◼   ► wrong, this is not really applicable in cases of design because you need to talk about it

01:00:25 ◼   ► in context and whether it fulfills the role. It's not a piece of art, it's not just supposed

01:00:28 ◼   ► to be pleasing to the eye, it has a functional aspect and so on and so forth. And so both

01:00:33 ◼   ► those links will be in the show notes.

01:00:37 ◼   ► My main reaction to Nevin's thing was, and I think people, I'm not going to call myself

01:00:41 ◼   ► an artist, but I did do a lot of art-related things early in my life and still sort of

01:00:46 ◼   ► have that bent, believe it or not, as a programmer.

01:00:50 ◼   ► And one of the things I always found myself

01:00:51 ◼   ► doing when I was doing visual artwork, and even visual design

01:00:55 ◼   ► stuff, is trying to prevent myself

01:00:59 ◼   ► from giving in to the feeling that Nevin has, which

01:01:02 ◼   ► is when you make something and you're sort of artistically

01:01:07 ◼   ► inclined, you can look at it and see that it's not quite right.

01:01:11 ◼   ► And if you have a little bit more experience and a little

01:01:13 ◼   ► bit more skill, you can see that it's not quite right

01:01:15 ◼   ► and know what's wrong with it and fix it.

01:01:17 ◼   ► So that's what he did with the App Store.

01:01:19 ◼   ► I kind of said, this doesn't look right to me.

01:01:22 ◼   ► And actually, I can go further than that.

01:01:23 ◼   ► I know why it doesn't look right.

01:01:25 ◼   ► It's because the space around the circle is not quite right.

01:01:28 ◼   ► If I change the circle to this size,

01:01:29 ◼   ► now it's more pleasing to me.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And it's sort of like an intuitive sense that you have.

01:01:33 ◼   ► That's the word that Nevin used.

01:01:35 ◼   ► He made another tweet about intuition

01:01:36 ◼   ► being a data-driven process running

01:01:39 ◼   ► on a machine with thousands of years of evolution

01:01:41 ◼   ► behind it or something to that effect.

01:01:42 ◼   ► But you look at it, and you just feel that's wrong.

01:01:44 ◼   ► So what you can do if you're making a piece of art is just keep changing it until you

01:01:51 ◼   ► feel happy with it.

01:01:52 ◼   ► "Oh, that doesn't look quite right.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Oh, that doesn't look..."

01:01:54 ◼   ► And if you know what it is about it that's wrong, you can keep moving it more and more

01:01:56 ◼   ► towards that idea until you look away and you're like, "Now, that's it.

01:01:59 ◼   ► That looks beautiful."

01:02:01 ◼   ► And some people just don't have that.

01:02:02 ◼   ► They can look at one logo and another logo.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Like, "Ah, they're about the same."

01:02:06 ◼   ► Another person, one logo with a circle that's 5% bigger can look totally wrong and the other

01:02:10 ◼   ► one is like, "Oh, that's the one."

01:02:12 ◼   ► But if you give in to that feeling when you're making something, if every single aspect of

01:02:16 ◼   ► it you just use your intuition to say, "Okay, that's not right.

01:02:21 ◼   ► I'm going to make it better.

01:02:22 ◼   ► That's not right.

01:02:23 ◼   ► I'm going to make it better."

01:02:24 ◼   ► What you end up doing is painting the entire design with a sameness, especially like in

01:02:29 ◼   ► web design.

01:02:30 ◼   ► But even just when you're drawing a picture or something, then you step away from it and

01:02:34 ◼   ► you're like, "Oh, now I have made this entire thing pleasing to the eye in all aspects,

01:02:39 ◼   ► and it looks bland and boring."

01:02:41 ◼   ► So one of the first impulses I can remember having when I was taking art lessons as a

01:02:46 ◼   ► kid is that sometimes when you're drawing something or designing something, you take

01:02:51 ◼   ► some aspect of it and you intentionally make it look "wrong."

01:02:57 ◼   ► Not wrong in the sense of ugly or anything, but you push the limit of it.

01:03:02 ◼   ► This would look perfect and right and nice and beautiful and be like the golden ratio

01:03:06 ◼   ► and it would look like a beautiful woman and it would look like nature and it would look

01:03:09 ◼   ► like a fractal and it would just be so pleasing to the eye, but I want to push

01:03:13 ◼   ► it slightly more along one axis because it creates a kind of visual and emotional

01:03:18 ◼   ► tension. You can't do that with all aspects, then you just make something

01:03:21 ◼   ► ugly, right? But if you take one aspect of it and you press it a little bit,

01:03:26 ◼   ► sometimes with the purpose, but sometimes just because you're like, "You know what?

01:03:29 ◼   ► This will be more interesting if I make this one aspect of it not conform to

01:03:34 ◼   ► this ideal of beauty that I have in my head." And you're knowingly doing that, and

01:03:37 ◼   ► And I'm not sure that's what iOS 7 is doing, but when I look at it, I think there are parts

01:03:43 ◼   ► of this design that's unsettling, or some would say ugly.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Colors are easier to be ugly.

01:03:48 ◼   ► But the circles, yes, I saw them and they looked too big to me as well.

01:03:51 ◼   ► But I thought, look, they know that these circles seem too big.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Perhaps it's for readability, the icon needs to be readable instead of just visually pleasing,

01:04:03 ◼   ► because if you made it smaller, it wouldn't look quite as nice.

01:04:05 ◼   ► But it also could be that a design where everything is made to conform to that beautiful ideal

01:04:10 ◼   ► is more boring and lacks character.

01:04:14 ◼   ► And I'm willing to believe that some aspects of IOSM's design were done with that in mind.

01:04:21 ◼   ► That a design that is beautiful in all aspects and perfectly conforms to our ideal of beauty

01:04:26 ◼   ► is boring.

01:04:27 ◼   ► And I like it to push the envelope in some aspect, because that's more interesting.

01:04:33 ◼   ► alternative there is that maybe Johnny Ive isn't that good at graphical design, which

01:04:37 ◼   ► is a lot less interesting.

01:04:40 ◼   ► He didn't draw the zycons himself.

01:04:43 ◼   ► There are more boring explanations.

01:04:44 ◼   ► They made them bigger so they're more readable, and they're going to refine them.

01:04:47 ◼   ► And the colors are harder to go by, but it's the same kind of thing in colors.

01:04:51 ◼   ► Sometimes you just—especially if you've done art for a really long time, you get burned

01:04:56 ◼   ► out on just everything being beautiful and perfect.

01:04:59 ◼   ► Sometimes you make something intentionally unsettling.

01:05:00 ◼   ► And I think there's a tension in that kind of design that tickles the brain nether regions

01:05:07 ◼   ► of artists who look at it, and they find that nicer.

01:05:10 ◼   ► And you end up with something that's polarizing.

01:05:13 ◼   ► Regular people probably don't care, except maybe about the colors, which people will

01:05:16 ◼   ► probably interpret as ugly.

01:05:17 ◼   ► But I think these icons and everything else about it will be refined over time.

01:05:21 ◼   ► But I hope they don't do a lot of the revisions that you see, like, "Oh, I've redesigned

01:05:26 ◼   ► iOS 7.

01:05:27 ◼   ► See how it's better this way?"

01:05:28 ◼   ► And there's just this sameness to them of just making everything boring in beautiful

01:05:33 ◼   ► and conventional ways, or desaturating the colors and making it all beautiful and low

01:05:39 ◼   ► contrast and pale and grayscale and lots of other designer-y tendencies that, if applied

01:05:44 ◼   ► en masse to an entire OS, make the whole thing boring.

01:05:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

01:05:51 ◼   ► I think it's too early to say whether they're just bad at this right now, or whether this

01:05:57 ◼   ► is intentionally along one side, I think time will tell.

01:06:04 ◼   ► I'm certainly interested to see what the fallout is from all the complaining about the icons.

01:06:10 ◼   ► Are they going to do a Microsoft Xbox 180 or are they just going to plow forward and

01:06:14 ◼   ► see what happens?

01:06:15 ◼   ► Convert them back.

01:06:16 ◼   ► I mean, Microsoft's design of Windows 8 was kind of, we have this bold direction, but

01:06:22 ◼   ► try to, like, in terms of shapes, I guess, if not in terms of colors, try to make things,

01:06:27 ◼   ► you know, reasonable. Like, there are no equivalents of those icons with the two big circles in

01:06:31 ◼   ► Windows 8 that I've seen, right? They fit things inside the boxes with, you know, correct

01:06:36 ◼   ► spacing and margins, and nothing is uncomfortably too big or too small within the borders, you

01:06:42 ◼   ► know, whereas some of those icons, like the grid itself, I mean, that outer circle is

01:06:46 ◼   ► just too darn close to the edges of that round rack, right? And it's uncomfortably close

01:06:50 ◼   ► for people with design sensibilities. And surely everyone inside Apple who has any design

01:06:55 ◼   ► sensibilities knows what Nevin put in there, that that isn't the most pleasing visual

01:07:02 ◼   ► arrangement. But I can think of lots of reasons why they would intentionally do that. So we'll

01:07:08 ◼   ► see.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Is that it?

01:07:10 ◼   ► I believe so.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Good deal.

01:07:12 ◼   ► All right. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors for this week, Squarespace and An Event Apart.

01:07:19 ◼   ► And I guess we'll see you next week.

01:07:26 ◼   ► They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:07:30 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:07:31 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental.

01:07:33 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:07:34 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:07:40 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:07:41 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental.

01:07:43 ◼   ► (Accidental)

01:07:44 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:07:49 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:07:59 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:08:03 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse

01:08:10 ◼   ► It's accidental (accidental)

01:08:14 ◼   ► They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:08:19 ◼   ► Tech Podcast So Long

01:08:24 ◼   ► For the live listeners, we should specify that the second show this week will be an

01:08:29 ◼   ► early recording. I know you kind of implied this, but it's an early recording because

01:08:34 ◼   ► Jon's traveling next week.

01:08:35 ◼   ► Right, so we're recording next week's episode this Friday, so in two days from now.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Hopefully Apple will not buy Nintendo on Monday.

01:08:45 ◼   ► What the hell made you think of that?

01:08:46 ◼   ► That would be hilarious.

01:08:47 ◼   ► I'm thinking of a story that it would kill me not to be able to talk about in a timely

01:08:52 ◼   ► manner and then you'd publish the show for next week and it would not be about Apple

01:08:57 ◼   ► buying Nintendo.

01:08:58 ◼   ► People are like, "What the hell is this?"

01:09:00 ◼   ► Well, Marco, has your Tumblr money come in?

01:09:03 ◼   ► Why don't you just buy Nintendo yourself?

01:09:04 ◼   ► It hasn't yet.

01:09:05 ◼   ► And then you can sell it.

01:09:06 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go.

01:09:07 ◼   ► I've gotten good at that.

01:09:08 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:09:09 ◼   ► Do you guys see this Mac Pro benchmark that was leaked like an hour, like 15 minutes after

01:09:17 ◼   ► we stopped talking about the Mac Pro? Oh, awesome. I clicked on it, but we had moved

01:09:20 ◼   ► on by then. I didn't get to read it, but... Show me the number. That's what I was so annoyed

01:09:25 ◼   ► about. Yeah, here they're doing it again. Don't compare the new Mac Pro to the old Mac

01:09:28 ◼   ► Pro. We all agree the old Mac Pro sucks. We want to compare it to like... I don't know

01:09:33 ◼   ► what to compare it to. Well, there's a few things that are interesting

01:09:34 ◼   ► about this benchmark. First of all, it is the first time we've seen, as far as I know,

01:09:41 ◼   ► it's the first time we've seen any benchmarks of the Xeon E5

01:09:45 ◼   ► V2 series.

01:09:47 ◼   ► Right?

01:09:48 ◼   ► I mean, this is--

01:09:49 ◼   ► I haven't been keeping up.

01:09:50 ◼   ► It's possible.

01:09:50 ◼   ► I don't even think--

01:09:51 ◼   ► I think this is the first time that a particular Xeon E5

01:09:55 ◼   ► model has even been leaked.

01:09:56 ◼   ► So now, if this is correct, now we

01:09:59 ◼   ► know there will be a model called the E5 2697.

01:10:03 ◼   ► It'll be 2.7 gigahertz, and it'll have 12 cores.

01:10:06 ◼   ► As far as I know, that's all new information.

01:10:09 ◼   ► But beyond that, I think the performance here

01:10:13 ◼   ► is really impressive.

01:10:14 ◼   ► It's obviously very impressive to get a Geekbench overall

01:10:17 ◼   ► score of almost 24,000 out of one socket.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Isn't that testing less than one third

01:10:23 ◼   ► of the transistors in this thing, though?

01:10:25 ◼   ► Well, there were multi-core tests and stuff.

01:10:28 ◼   ► No, but I mean the GPUs.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Most of the compute power in that device is in the GPUs.

01:10:32 ◼   ► Right, that's true.

01:10:33 ◼   ► I don't know how much Geekbench is stressing those.

01:10:34 ◼   ► So this is more of a CPU benchmark.

01:10:35 ◼   ► I don't think it does any GPU.

01:10:36 ◼   ► Or maybe it has a different mode for it.

01:10:37 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:10:38 ◼   ► But yeah, this doesn't mention GPUs at all. So I'm guessing it's all it's only a CPU benchmark

01:10:42 ◼   ► So it's kind of like it's like weird. It's like, you know

01:10:44 ◼   ► Come up with a good car analogy. It's like

01:10:47 ◼   ► Bench benchmarking

01:10:51 ◼   ► Benchmarking the the gas mileage of the Veyron. It's an interesting benchmark

01:10:55 ◼   ► But maybe not what that car is designed to do

01:10:58 ◼   ► And so this machine come right like it's basically a bunch of GPUs RAM and SSD

01:11:02 ◼   ► And oh by the way a CPU attached to the thing to run it all

01:11:05 ◼   ► In terms of like transistor count and may print like as Marco pointed out perhaps in terms of RAM count as well. I

01:11:11 ◼   ► mean the sad part is like

01:11:14 ◼   ► What they've been able to pull off this really great score that with one socket

01:11:19 ◼   ► blows away the the previous 12 core by something like 10 or 15 percent that did with two sockets, but

01:11:25 ◼   ► Imagine if they made a two socket version of this

01:11:29 ◼   ► Then you could have obviously have like a forty five thousand geekbench score

01:11:34 ◼   ► Well, can you find software that uses 24 cores? That's pretty difficult to find.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Video encoding software.

01:11:41 ◼   ► What about your magical script that you wrote way back when? I remember seeing that fly

01:11:47 ◼   ► by during your Tumblr days when you were trying to encode something.

01:11:50 ◼   ► Parallelize? Yeah, it's a script that you use. I think there's now an argument for X-ARGS

01:11:55 ◼   ► or something that does roughly the same thing.

01:11:57 ◼   ► Just make -j 25.

01:12:03 ◼   ► You know what annoys me when I edit this show is that MP3 encoding is not well parallelizable.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Because there's this bit reservoir or something. I don't know. There's some reason I was looking

01:12:15 ◼   ► into it why the lame encoder is just single threaded.

01:12:20 ◼   ► Why it's lame?

01:12:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:22 ◼   ► Because any compression scheme, the data depends on the data that comes both before and after it.

01:12:28 ◼   ► it so it's not easy to break it up into chunks because the chunks are related to each other.

01:12:33 ◼   ► And the video encoders are so insanely CPU intensive that I would imagine they were

01:12:40 ◼   ► designed from the very beginning to be more parallel-friendly.

01:12:44 ◼   ► But they have the same thing. Video codecs have the thing where the current frame depends

01:12:48 ◼   ► on the past frame and the future frame. Obviously these are parallelizable.

01:12:52 ◼   ► But there's blocks. There's the B frame or something and then there's a block and you can

01:12:56 ◼   ► you can pass one block to a different thread and--

01:12:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, like it's parallelizable,

01:13:00 ◼   ► but it's not as simple as something like,

01:13:02 ◼   ► you know, just chop the data up into pieces,

01:13:04 ◼   ► have those pieces process independently,

01:13:06 ◼   ► reassemble the results,

01:13:07 ◼   ► which would be like strict linear parallelization.

01:13:10 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

01:13:11 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't know.

01:13:13 ◼   ► I think what concerns me about this 12 core

01:13:17 ◼   ► is that, let me see, I wonder if we can get,

01:13:19 ◼   ► let me pull up a comparison between the,

01:13:23 ◼   ► like the single threaded tests

01:13:25 ◼   ► of this versus my current 3.33 GHz, two generations old Xeon,

01:13:31 ◼   ► this might be slower in certain things.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Because I just have that raw clock speed advantage.

01:13:35 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:13:35 ◼   ► Anyway, I'll do that after the show.

01:13:37 ◼   ► But this is very interesting.

01:13:39 ◼   ► Or clock speed.

01:13:41 ◼   ► This is very interesting, though, that this tells us

01:13:44 ◼   ► quite a lot of new information.

01:13:45 ◼   ► That I think most people are like, oh, good,

01:13:46 ◼   ► the new Mac Pro is faster.

01:13:48 ◼   ► But if you look, this announces details about the Xeon.

01:13:51 ◼   ► It confirms certain percentage improvements

01:13:55 ◼   ► the previous Zeons. So this is very interesting to see.

01:14:00 ◼   ► So on a wildly unrelated note, Sam the Geek in the chat was asking how you and Marco you

01:14:04 ◼   ► and I met. And then I said it's a long and mostly uninteresting story. And then Simon

01:14:11 ◼   ► Kao, I said, and John Siracusa will tear apart why the friendship is not really that great.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Which I thought was pretty awesome. I don't feel like we should tell the story because

01:14:21 ◼   ► I think I'd rather watch all our friends in the chat just invent answers.

01:14:26 ◼   ► It's probably more interesting than the real story.

01:14:28 ◼   ► Oh, it's so much more interesting than the real story.